Home
UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series
The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe

The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe

From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700

by Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series

Digital download
9781487535506
Published: January 2020

Digital download
9781487535490
Published: January 2020

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres – from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing – was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Mercedes García-Arenal

I. Staging Inquisitions: Nature, Culture, Religion

1. Trusting the “I”: Picaresque Confession and Early Modern Scepticism
Barbara Fuchs

2. Feeling Certainty, Performing Sincerity: The Emotional Hermeneutics of Truth in Inquisitorial and Theatrical Practice
Paul Michael Johnson

3. Conflicting Certainties or Different Truths: Healers and Inquisition in Baroque Spain
María Luz López Terrada

4. True Peste and False Doors: Medical and Legal Discourse during the Great Castilian Plague, 1596–1601
Ruth MacKay

5. Policing Talent in Early Modern Jesuit Rome: Difference, Self-Knowledge, and Career Specialization
Javier Patiño Loira

II. Negotiating History and Theology

6. Stolen Saint: Relic Theft and Relic Identification in Seventeenth-Century Rome
A. Katie Stirling-Harris

7. Baptizing “Uncertain Human Beings”? Probabilist Theology and the Question of the Beginning of Human Life in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism
Stefania Tutino

8. Truth and Human History in Melchor Cano’s De locis theologicis
Fernando Rodríguez Mediano

9. Ambivalent Origins: Isaac La Peyrère and the Politics of Historical Certainty in Seventeenth-Century Europe
Carlos Cañete

Barbara Fuchs is a professor of Spanish and English at UCLA.

Mercedes García-Arenal is a research professor at Grupo de Investigación de Historia Cultural del Mediterráneo.

"How did theology, medicine, law, natural science, exegesis and literature respond to the rising demand for credibility and truth? All nine essays in this volume adopt an approach we could call case-based, a <em>CHOICE</em> that renders the individual articles particularly intriguing."
~Vincenzo Lavenia, Università di Bologna, Journal of Jesuit Studies

“Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal have distinguished themselves, not only as gifted scholars but also as notably successful collaborators and editors of collections of essays. Their previous volumes of essays demonstrate a consistently high quality of scholarship and a coherence of thematic focus. The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550–1700, is a worthy addition to this corpus.” ~Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, Principia College, Journal of Modern History